WebProNews

One of the ideals of putting information online is that information can stay there indefinitely, accessible to anyone for as long as a website operator chooses. But as a couple of people have pointed out, if you earn money through advertising, it's a bad idea to take down old content that is still useful.

Professional journalism blogger Matthew Buckland reveals that UK online newspaper, Guardian Unlimited, earns a third of its article page traffic (excluding front-pages) from articles more than one month old.

If there's advertising on those pages, or if the goal is to have traffic bragging rights for future advertisers, it seems a no-brainer that an online publication would foot the cost of storage and keep those articles up.

But as Mike at Techdirt illustrates, and as many of us have no doubt found out for ourselves, online newspapers don't always hang on to aging content.

"That's annoying for sites like ours where we link to those news sources. When we go looking for more information later, our links go to nowhere."

It's not just annoying, but it's counterproductive. Your site loses traffic and revenue when online researchers are looking for that particular information.

Maybe those who drop old content are following the multiple presents model of Internet reality due to search engines creation of an artificial "simultaneity of the non-simultaneous."

Otherwise, it just seems silly to cut off a third of your legs that way.

Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.